Even though most people think searching on Google is fast, Google is obsessed with shaving more milliseconds off the time it takes people to search.
Its latest effort is made public Tuesday, when people reviewing Google search results will be able to preview Web pages without clicking on them, a new feature called Instant Previews.
Google users will see a tiny magnifying glass next to their search results. If they click on that image, they will be able to scroll over any of the search results to view a preview of the Web page without clicking on it.
“We’re trying to avoid the case where you click on a result and you discover pretty much instantly that it’s not what you were looking for and you click back and click on a different result,” said Raj Krishnan, a Google product manager who worked on Instant Previews. “That’s a bad experience.”
He says that this builds on other things Google has done to speed up search, like Google Instant, which predicts what people will type before they type it, and snippets, the lines of text that offer information about the Web site on the search results page.
For some searches, Google will highlight the place on the page where the word appears, so the person doing the search can see the context and location of the word. Mr. Krishnan said it was helpful for people trying to figure out whether the page is about the same person they are searching for, for instance, or whether the topic shows up in the heart of the page or in footnotes.
For a few billion popular Web pages, Google will store the images of the pages. For others, it will generate the preview on the fly, in less than one-tenth of a second, Mr. Krishnan said.
Other search engines, including Google, have offered versions of page previews before. And RockMelt, the new browser, lets its users quickly view Google search results and preview the pages.
